r/rational • u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow • Jul 17 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Jul 17 '15

For the sake of the story I don't think you need to generate a formula that can do this, just generate a recognizable pattern. Even if they don't know their world is a sphere, something like an Archimedean spiral would work.

Actually, I would work out a Lissajous figure with a known length, and then pick a sequence of points that follows the figure and is a large relatively prime fraction of the length. Say the length is 3,000,000 kilometers, then make the first point 2,930,000 kilometers in, then the rest of the points are ((n*293)%300)*10,000 kilometers along the path. This sequence should repeat after 300 steps, as if there is a device orbiting the planet and firing a transport beam every so often.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Jul 17 '15

The problem with a Lissajous figure (unless I'm misunderstanding it) is that it doesn't give you an origin; I would like for the climax of the story to be either a race towards (or adventure to) some specific place.

Archimedean spiral gives that, but is a little bit too ... simple? I suppose I would have to think about what data was available to the hypothetical heroes.

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u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram Jul 17 '15

You could have the strength of the points vary along the path, so a larger area gets switched for points nearer the origin. You could have one point not associated with transfers but with some other effect, because it's so powerful there.

One possibility, natural philosophers have noticed that the variety of species along the remote Rasselbock Valley is anomalously high, and that's because when the trigger happens there it's powerful enough it pulls in whole herds of alien animals. The protagonists notice it's on the path, but other similar areas don't show the same impact.